With the movie makers

by Myron M. Stearns

Also, to be sure, the principle did not apply particularly to electricians or carpenters or other laborers, to whom a day’s work was a day’s work, with a union wage, likely, at whatever odd job it happened to be.

Can you see the results of this El Dorado process of selection? The first to enter the field, good, bad, and indifferent, but mostly a pretty poor average, just as with the gold-seekers, got the experience, and the best jobs, and here and there the big money. When the game developed, and assumed enormous and stable proportions, and attracted the best writers and the best artists and the best editors and all the rest—as it is beginning to do now—they found all the important jobs nailed down. It became a slow, uphill job of displacing experienced mediocrity, the man who could never think or rise above a certain level, with inexperienced excellence—the fellow who was handicapped by knowing little about motion pictures, and the enmity of the fellow whose job he might eventually get, besides. One Saturday Evening Post contributor went around from studio to studio in Southern California at one time, trying to get a job, writing scenarios. He had a chance to cool his heels in little ante-rooms for hours together. Finally he gave up and went back to magazine work. The movie jobs were all taken.

To parallel Big Bill, there is a movie producer here and one there, striking it comparatively rich—spending the money as it comes in; sooner or later, much as he makes, he will probably run out of luck and drop out of the game.

There is a parallel of the three sky-pilots on Poso Flat, in the better class of investors and purchasers and experimenters, who have come into motion pictures with the idea of both improving and “uplifting” them, and eventually lost out. The “League for Better Pictures,” and a dozen more. The industry wasn’t quite ready for them—and perhaps, too, they were a little too adventurous themselves, and weren’t quite equal to the job they were tackling.

There is even a parallel between the old man who buried his dust and forgot where he hid it, and some of the movie producers. One motion-picture concern was owned by a man who had been a druggist and sold out. He invested the two thousand dollars or so he possessed in making one of the first “Westerns,” and in the great sweep of movie good-luck that took good and bad alike to success at certain fortunate periods, saw his $2,000 turn to $20,000. So he invested that again—and so on. Then, as a millionaire, he had to watch his pictures lose money, and his fortune dwindle as unaccountably as the money had come in. He hunted everywhere for new stories and new helpers, and tried this and that—and still his pictures lost money.

The fact is, he did not have the ability to keep up with the procession; soon, in a financial sense, he must die, and the shack that he built fall down and be forgotten.

And there is a parallel between the hold-ups that marked the wild banditry of the Sierras, and the loose methods of the early movie producers and workers,—stealing a scenario here, selling worthless stock there, and all the rest.

And just as in San Francisco, after the gold fever, the Vigilantes had to come along and try to straighten things out without the old machinery of the law, so recently we have seen the censorship movement, that has tried to make the movies clean up, whether they wanted to or not.

But the most striking parallel of all is in the forgotten towns of the Kern River valley, and the country now opening up and so wonderfully fertile and productive around Bakersfield. The old gold rush is over, for the most part, in the movies as with California and the Klondike. Greenhorn City, the old mining town of the first gold-seekers, is hardly more than a memory—as are the old lurid, unreal movie melodramas of the first years, that drew crowds simply because they showed people and things in motion. Isabella and Bodfish still survive, but nobody pays much attention to them any more. At Bakersfield, though, oil has been discovered and developed, and the great farming country is at last being really cultivated—just as in the movies the big “better-class” pictures have at last been found to pay more than the old melodramatic gold-getters.

We can compare the old-time films, with their impossible situations and their innumerable “stars” to the old gold nuggets and lawless claims of ’49; the pictures of Douglas Fairbanks and Griffith, and some of the rest, correspond to the oil development, let us say, of the second period; and the final stage of all, the development of the fertile fields around Bakersfield through good sense and hard work, is even now only just beginning to come to the movies, in the educational field, with scientific films, and films for the schoolrooms, and in the really high-grade product of the new, hard-working, clear-thinking movie producers who are gradually beginning to force their way into the field.